De fábrica de marginal a mães guerreiras: uma etnografia sobre a luta de mães de vítimas da violência do Estado

Abstract

The present work is the result of a multisituated ethnography on the political performance of mothers of victims of violence in the State of Rio de Janeiro from 2014 to 2018. In these four years of research I have followed public and private, institutional and noninstitutional, open events and reserved, in which I constantly had to negotiate my presence and reposition myself according to each situation: sometimes as a researcher, sometimes as a supporter of the cause. I have analyzed protests, public hearings, lectures, seminars, honors, religious masses, focus groups, training courses, individual interviews and informal conversations, as well as secondary materials such as books and documentaries with the participation of mothers. Thus, the thesis is divided into three major parts, in addition to the introduction and conclusion. In the first part I discuss the relationship of mothers of victims of institutional violence with the state from the state theory on the banks of Das and Poole and the rise of Wacquant's penal state, showing how the state presents itself to these women through the police, the socio-educational system and the judiciary, which Wacquant would call the right hand of the state or the state's repressive arm, where human rights violations are frequent because they are margins of that state - where the line between the legal and illegal is tenuous and easily outdated. In the second part, I seek to work on the political organization of these mothers by discussing theories of social movements, highlighting their network organization, their relationship with NGOs, the construction of collective identity, the professionalization of activism, symbolic and material patterns - including both claims of recognition as well as redistribution, and the transnationalization of the struggle and denunciation of racism. Finally, in the last part I try to think of the concept of warrior ethos as discussed by Zaluar in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to propose the notion of warrior ethos constructed by mothers of victims of institutional violence who identify themselves as warrior mothers , bringing the discussion about black motherhood from Collins, Davis, and Rocha. In this sense, the thesis portrays the transformation of the identity of these women from factories of marginal to warrior mothers, from stigmatizing heteroidentification to positive self-identification constitutive of a specific ethos, from the appropriation of their history and self-assertion as fundamental political actors in the defense of Human Rights and in the fight against institutional violence and structural racism in the present day